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This is an exciting day for Adobe AIR developers who create amazing Flash based apps capable of reaching over 350 million smartphones and tablets by the end of this year, including the iPad. Today, Amazon began shipping the Kindle Fire, a new tablet boasting a 7” full color multi-touch display with 8GB of internal storage and free cloud storage for all Amazon content.

The Kindle Fire is already equipped to run AIR apps available on the Amazon Appstore for Android, right out of the box. Using Flash Builder or Flash Professional and the AIR SDK, developers can create and deliver Flash based apps via AIR, which run outside of the browser and deliver rich interaction and stunning performance. The Fire shipped with AIR 2.7, but developers can deliver AIR 3 apps by leveraging captive runtime. Apps created for the Android Market can also be published to the Amazon Appstore and there are currently many cool AIR apps available on the Appstore already, including:

Adobe is all about enabling designers and developers to create the most expressive content possible, regardless of platform or technology. For more than a decade, Flash has enabled the richest content to be created and deployed on the web by reaching beyond what browsers could do. It has repeatedly served as a blueprint for standardizing new technologies in HTML. Over the past two years, we’ve delivered Flash Player for mobile browsers and brought the full expressiveness of the web to many mobile devices.

However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this, and will continue our work with key players in the HTML community, including Google, Apple, Microsoft and RIM, to drive HTML5 innovation they can use to advance their mobile browsers.

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook. We will of course continue to provide critical bug fixes and security updates for existing device configurations. We will also allow our source code licensees to continue working on and release their own implementations.

These changes will allow us to increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video. Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection. Flash developers can take advantage of these features, and all that our Flash tooling has to offer, to reach more than a billion PCs through their browsers and to package native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.

We are already working on Flash Player 12 and a new round of exciting features which we expect to again advance what is possible for delivering high definition entertainment experiences. We will continue to leverage our experience with Flash to accelerate our work with the W3C and WebKit to bring similar capabilities to HTML5 as quickly as possible, just as we have done with CSS Shaders. And, we will design new features in Flash for a smooth transition to HTML5 as the standards evolve so developers can confidently invest knowing their skills will continue to be leveraged.

We are super excited about the next generations of HTML5 and Flash. Together they offer developers and content publishers great options for delivering compelling web and application experiences across PCs and devices. There is already amazing work being done that is pushing the newest boundaries, and we can’t wait to see what is still yet to come!

Danny Winokur is the Vice President and General Manager of Interactive Development at Adobe

Circ, available for Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and iOS, is so simple in its gameplay but challenging at the same time—players navigate their spaceships collecting stars and points, while escaping from planets and stars trying to pull the ship away from its course. It’s the kind of game that’s perfect for passing the time between train stops or even just for a quiet few minutes at home.

Similarly, the challenge for Scrape Apps, the brains behind Circ, is navigating the hurdles related to releasing the game across platforms in spite of a limited budget and limited team resources. That’s why they turned to the Adobe Flash Platform, specifically Flash Builder.

The team leveraged features in Flash Builder such as reusable coding, automatic debugging and streamlined optimization to make the game available on as many platforms as possible in the least amount of time using the least amount of resources. Now the Circ team is looking forward to building new enhancements into the game, while taking advantage of Flash Builder’s flexibility and extensibility.

To learn more about how the Circ development team worked with the Flash Platform, visit here. Also be sure to check out www.adobe.com/gaming for more about our gaming solutions.

The Chinese based development shop Gamegoo creates online games that take players to a fantasy land with its popular online games like “Might & Hero,” “Duel on Mount Hua,” and “Qi-Xiong Hegemony.”

Using Flash Player 11 and the Adobe Flash Platform , Gamegoo has created these highly popular and profitable Web games in China, attracting more than 1 million players daily. The key feature that the company used for to develop these games was Stage 3D, which provided Gamegoo with accelerated graphics and animation development. This allowed the company to providing gamers with enhanced 3D elements and a better gaming experience. One of Gamegoo’s games, Qi-Xiong Hegemony, was developed with Flash Player 11 and has been a huge success China. Since it was released, it has brought in more than $780,000 each day and is now one of the top seven online games in China. To learn more about how Gamegoo used Adobe technologies to enhance the Web based gaming experience, read more here.

Becoming a number 1 iPad 2 game is probably as challenging as building a futuristic robot and navigating him through scrap yards. Not coincidentally, Czech game developer Amanita Design accomplished both with its critically acclaimed online adventure game, Machinarium, built with the Adobe Flash Platform.

The game tests players’ puzzle-solving skills, as they guide their robot through puzzles and obstacles to reach the city of Machinarium and save his girlfriend from the bad guys. Gamers praise the gameplay, but were particularly impressed with the game’s textured and animated graphics. Since it began in 2003, Amanita Design has used the Flash Platform to not only deliver great visuals, but also easily bring Machinarium to virtually any desktop or mobile platform.

The team leveraged Adobe Flash Builder to reuse original code from the web version of the game to bring it to other platforms like Android, with BlackBerry Tablet OS coming soon. The best part is that it only took two months! To create the game’s rich graphics, Amanita used a combination of Photoshop and Flash Professional, as well as Adobe AIR to deliver the game across mobile devices.

To learn more about how Amanita delivered this top game so quickly across different devices and platforms, visit here.

Angry Birds at Adobe MAX: Preview of New Flash-Based Version of Popular Game

Casual gamers and game aficionados alike have come to love playing Angry Birds by Rovio on their mobile devices. Coming off yesterday’s highly anticipated launch of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, we’re excited to take gaming to a whole new level with its hardware accelerated 2D and 3D graphics rendering. Today at Adobe MAX, I was joined onstage by Rovio’s general manager of North America, Andrew Stalbow, who previewed a new version of Angry Birds preparing to take flight – built on Flash Player 11 using the Starling framework, an ActionScript 3 2D framework developed on top of GPU hardware accelerated 2D/3D APIs. While Rovio has worked with several technologies from native development on mobile devices to HTML, this new Flash Player version of Angry Birds will further broaden the game’s reach and help Rovio gain a wider audience for its content.

Like Adobe, Rovio is committed to providing an immersive and innovative user experience. During the keynote, Andrew said, “We loved developing with Flash and Adobe because of the consistent and rich user experience it provides. […] We have an amazing brand in Angry Birds and we want to deliver an incredible experience to our fans. With Flash Player 11, we are able to deliver new and unique experiences that consumers haven’t seen before.”

Andrew provided a sneak peek of this new Flash-based version of Angry Birds and we’re thrilled to be helping Rovio usher in a new era for its blockbuster game on the web. Check out the image below for a taste of what’s to come. Andrew commented that Rovio plans to bring the full Angry Birds game experience to the Flash Platform in the next few months. Check out the Angry Birds demo below.

Epic Games Takes the Stage at MAX with Unreal Engine 3 (UE3)

And the gaming momentum didn’t stop with Angry Birds! We also provided a glimpse into what the new Stage 3D API in Flash Player and AIR will bring to the web and what the future of 3D on the web will look like. I was also joined onstage by Epic Games CEO, Founder and Technical Director Tim Sweeney – who unveiled the company’s award-winning Unreal Engine 3 (UE3) technology running fully inside a Flash-based environment. Epic has always been known for raising the bar in the gaming industry, and now we’re working together to raise the bar on the web through Flash.

“Flash Player upgrades the web to a AAA game engine,” Tim commented during the keynote. The live technical demonstration of “Unreal Tournament 3,” Epic’s blockbuster first-person shooter for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PCs, was visually enhanced for an unprecedented real-time experience inside Flash Player 11. “With UE3 and Flash, games built for high-end consoles can now run on the Web or as Facebook apps, reaching an enormous user base,” Tim said in their press release. “This totally changes the playing field for game developers who want to widely deploy and monetize their games.” Watch Tim’s Flash-based 3D game demo:

Adobe continues pushing the boundaries of technology and digital experiences – and we can’t wait to see how our community will continue to change the face of the web!

Video games provide you with the chance to be a fighter pilot, sharp shooter or warrior. With Tanki Online, the first, online multiplayer 3D action desktop game using Flash Player, you can be a pro on the battlefield and work with your team to destroy enemy tanks, help your team and build up your ammunition arsenal. More than four million people worldwide immerse themselves in this virtual battlefield.

AlternativaPlatform, a Russian based company that creates multiplayer browser games, created Tanki 2, the follow up to the popular Tanki Online, with Flash Player 11, Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection components and Adobe Flash Builder, to create the 3D geometry and animation for the game. AternativaPlatform used Stage 3D to deliver Tanki Online as a cutting edge 3D experience for gamers. Stage 3D allowed AlternativaPlatform to create accelerated graphics and animation development, and create more realistic and smooth gameplay for Tanki Online.

To learn more about how Alternativa Platform used Adobe technologies for the best multiplayer, battlefield experience, read more here.

When you think of outer reaches of space, other galaxies and the future, you’re probably not envisioning a flat, 2D environment. Add high-octane spaceships pitted against each other to the mix, and you’d definitely want to see this spectacle seamlessly rendered in compelling 3D graphics and images. Game development company Pro 3 Games, science-fiction fans themselves, hear you and developed the 3D, multi-platform, space adventure game you’ve been looking for in Delta Strike, built with the Adobe Flash Platform.

Available across different browsers and social media platforms like Facebook, Delta Strike started as 2D drawings, but gamers want console-quality, high-performance 3D gameplay regardless of their platform. Pro 3 Games needed a solution to accelerate the game’s development, but not at the expense of delivering stable, sophisticated 3D experiences. As a result, Pro 3 Games tapped the ubiquity of Adobe Flash Player and Stage 3D, a new set of low-level, GPU-accelerated 3D APIs, to rapidly generate the 3D graphics in Delta Strike including spacecrafts, animations and backgrounds.

In fact, the development time was so quick that a demo version was released in just six days, and the full, 3D version of the game was delivered in a mere three months! Because Flash Player eliminated the need for gamers to download plug-ins, Pro 3 Games is able to reach the widest audience possible, easily monetize the game and continue delivering the high-performance 3D experiences that gamers crave.

To learn more about how Pro 3 Games and how they leveraged the Adobe Flash Platform to create this highly engaging 3D space adventure, visit here.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Adobe Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 will be launching in early October. These milestone releases introduce the next generation of the technologies that deliver stunning content and apps to over a billion people — across screens including Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook, Windows, Mac, and connected TV devices — pushing the boundaries of what’s possible on the web.

Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 take these even further by introducing Stage 3D, a new architecture for hardware accelerated graphics rendering that delivers 1000x faster rendering performance over Flash Player 10. It enables new classes of console-quality games and immersive apps, such as Tanki Online and Zombie Tycoon (see videos below). Stage 3D enables content that efficiently animate millions of objects on screen, smoothly rendered at 60 frames per second — the result is fluid, cinematic app and game experiences. Additionally, these releases deliver new features to support theater-quality HD video, native 64-bit optimizations, high-quality HD video conferencing, and a powerful, flexible architecture for leveraging native device and platform capabilities. We’re turning the dial up.

Building Blocks

Flash began with a few bits of colored plastic, inspired by experiences of playing with LEGOs as kids. Over 15 years, Flash has provided some of the most creative building blocks for designers and developers, pushing innovation and helping the web to evolve and iterate at a rapid pace defined by creativity. Flash made fluid animation an integral part of the web, defining our modern expectations for smooth, animated user interfaces. And since then, Flash has made features such as rich typography, beautiful interfaces leveraging dynamic vector and raster graphics, dynamic synchronized audio playback, advanced scripting, and seamless HD video mainstream — not just as experiments waiting to reach the world, but capabilities accessible to virtually every connected computer on the Internet. Many of the capabilities that Flash pioneered have over time moved into web standards and browsers, and will continue to do so as Adobe works closely with the web standards community and continues to develop products that support and advance HTML5. Piece by piece, Flash has enhanced and upgraded what’s possible for over a billion people on web, and Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 continue that tradition.

The Next-Generation Console Has Arrived

Today, approximately 70% of web games are powered by Flash, along with 9 of the top 10 games on Facebook, about 70% of the games on Google+, and the top social games from companies like Zynga and EA. Games at their best are fluid, immersive experiences, and the unmatched consistency of Flash Player allows game developers to focus on making great games rather than fight fragmented technology. Games just play. And play big: Flash Player brings an audience over 11 times larger than that of the best-selling current generation game console.

Flash Player 11 is the next-generation console for the web: now with Stage 3D (codenamed “Molehill”), it provides a consistent platform for gorgeous games and rich engaging content — hundreds of millions of users will be able to instantly upgrade to a whole new level of games on the web with a simple update, ready to experience amazing games using Stage 3D when they come to market later this year and early 2012. With stunning hardware accelerated graphics, mature dynamic audio, immersive full screen, native support for mouse/multi-touch/camera input, low-latency peer-to-peer multiplayer networking, full HD 1080p video playback, and high-quality voice chat, Flash Player provides the building blocks for incredible games.

Everyone wins. Content using the new Stage 3D APIs will automatically take advantage of modern GPU hardware, from integrated graphics chips to the most advanced high-end graphics cards, to provide incredibly fluid graphics — and Stage 3D also provides accelerated software rendering for content on older computers (yep, even mom’s old PC with Windows XP), where it runs up to 2-10x faster than software rendering in Flash Player 10. In other words, all computers with Flash Player 11 can benefit from the accelerated performance of Stage 3D. And game publishers can also package their Flash technology-based apps using AIR to deliver them across Android, iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry PlayBook, Windows, Mac, and connected TV devices. To learn about some of the benefits of the Flash Platform for game publishers, check out the new Adobe Gaming Solutions page at www.adobe.com/go/gaming.

Hear more about the Stage 3D accelerated graphics architecture from the Flash Runtime team:

Adoption of new Flash Player releases has been accelerating — nearly half of the web upgrades Flash Player within four weeks of a new release — so websites can expect that many of the over 1 billion people with Flash Player will be able to reap the benefits of Stage 3D soon, bringing modern GPU hardware acceleration to more people on the web than any other technology. The efficient Stage 3D architecture was designed from the ground up with resource-constrained mobile devices in mind — the full, optimized rendering model will be supported on smartphones and tablets as well, and we’re making this support available in a private prerelease.

Combined with high-level graphics frameworks built on Stage 3D, including a range of specialized, optimized third-party graphics frameworks and game engines, Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 make incredible graphics performance everywhere accessible to a range of developers, whether they’re building rich 3D visualization apps or sophisticated, expressive games. Some of these great frameworks include Alternativa 3D, Away 3D, Flare 3D, Minko, and Yogurt 3D. Adobe will also soon make a 3D framework technology preview called Proscenium available on Adobe Labs. Proscenium will allow developers using Flash Builder to rapidly prototype experiences focused on simple content interaction and display, whether for simple games, visualization, or high-quality rendering of small object collections.

And we’re especially delighted to announce Starling, a flexible, lightweight framework for 2D graphics and animation that combines the simplicity of Flash with the incredible power of modern hardware accelerated graphics provided by Stage 3D. The Starling Framework is a free and open source ActionScript library designed to be instantly familiar to developers and designers using the traditional Flash display list. Starling and Stage 3D in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 enable easy intuitive GPU-accelerated graphics programming for everyone. Beautiful is now simple.

Particle effects with Starling and Stage 3D in Flash Player 11:

Rolling Forward

We’ve seen lots of momentum with Flash Player and AIR, especially in these areas:

Gaming: Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 allow game publishers to instantly deliver engaging games to anyone with a PC, tablet, smartphone, or connected TV. And with Stage 3D, game publishers and developers can take their games to a new level, creating new opportunities for game developers and publishers to deliver and monetize their content. Two of the many upcoming games leveraging Stage 3D include Tanki Online and Ultimate Race Championship.

To experience a tablet game with Flash today, check out Machinarium, an award-winning puzzle and adventure game for the iPad 2 that within one day became the #1 game on iTunes in the U.S. and 12 other countries, #1 app overall, and “iPad Game of the Week” — and it’s coming soon for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook (play a demo right in your browser with Flash Player). Visit the Flash Game Technology Center to learn more about building games with Flash. And check out this short video on Machinarium and upcoming Stage 3D -enabled content

Snapping Key Pieces in Place

Some of the other benefits coming with Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 include:

A fully modern architecture. Flash Player 11 delivers full native 64-bit support for 64-bit browsers on Linux, Mac OS, and Windows, while also leveraging advanced processor optimizations to deliver additional performance.

Simple, instant app install. Developers can package their apps with AIR 3 as a captive runtime for one-click, seamless installs on Android, Windows, and Mac OS (in addition to iOS) without any additional runtime download.

And there are dozens more new capabilities in Flash Player 11 and AIR 3 that web and app developers will be able to take advantage of to create beautiful new experiences. Check out our press release and Labs release notes to see the complete list of what’s new, and we’ll be highlighting more of these features in the future (and even more at Adobe MAX). We look forward to delivering the release versions in early October, and if you want to get your hands on them now, you can download the release candidate versions from Adobe Labs today. With Flash Player 11 and AIR 3, we’re providing some amazing new building blocks. We’re thrilled to see what you create with them.

We’re very excited to announce that Machinarium, an award-winning, point-and-click adventure and puzzle game developed with Flash technology is now the #1 iPad app in all paid categories in the U.S. and 12 other countries after just one day! This popular app comes on the heels of other top rated, Flash-based apps on iTunes, Android Market and BlackBerry AppWorld like Politifact (#1 news app on iTunes, Top 100 app in all of iTunes), Dr Stanley’s House (#1 most popular gaming app on iTunes China) and apps from ESPN, Coca-Cola, Facebook, California Academy of Sciences and others.

Previously available as an in-browser game on desktops via Flash Player, Machinarium was ported as a Flash-based app for the iPad 2 and is coming to Android Market and BlackBerry AppWorld soon – all with the power of Adobe AIR. Machinarium is gaining traction worldwide as the top app in iOS App Stores in several other countries as well, and is also the iPad Game of the Week. The game was designed by Amanita Design in the Czech Republic and one of our gaming evangelists, Tom Krcha, has posted an interview on his blog with Machinarium designer and director, Jakub Dvorský. Check it out, and you can download the game here!